Self-Signing Certificate for Outlook with OpenSSL
07-06-2009
There are dozens of pages that talk about digital certificates for e-mail encryption in Outlook, but many of them are confusing, misleading, or lead to commercial products. I just finished deploying a self-signed certificate using the free OpenSSL toolkit, and thought somebody else might benefit from summary set of instructions to short-cut the process.
Just to be clear, this method requires no commercial software and you don't have to jump through any identify hoops to get the certificate. It's instant gratification. HOWEVER, both the sender and recipient need to exchange keys, because self-signed certificates aren't recognized by any standard signing authority... that's the point!